"A Simple Recipe for Daal" was published in the Cortland Review and was also an honorable mention in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Context.
"I am regulated to standing by her side, just as if I was still a little girl. Warm
September sunshine pours in through the kitchen window, and I am transported to the ten year old version of myself, tugging at my mother's skirt, thinking she would always be there for me, for us. This kitchen, my mother's, was a special place, this is where I told her about friends who were funny, friends that I loved, friends that betrayed me, my grades, secret things best kept away from my father, acceptance into medical school, about the hard-working man that would be my husband, and about the announcement that she would be a grandmother. In this kitchen, all of this happened."
"From the back of the Ford, Cree watched the oil rigs
roll by. There were so many of
them. When her Pops had brought
her here so long ago, it was just empty North Dakota prairie. No highway--just dust and dirt. Now, the burnt
chemical smell of the fresh asphalt leaked into the car, and the towers,
hundreds of them, dotted the landscape."
"Shipmate" was published in Prole, Poetry and Prose, Issue 8 in 2012.
"People often think that young men join the military to defend their country. That might be true for some, but most guys I joined with did it to get away. Away from their burdensome families, away form their nagging girlfriends, away from the assholes cops and one stoplight dead-end towns, away from friends who stole cars and hit mailboxes, away from debt and bullshit dead-end jobs --- just away."
